“It is best to start with as imposing a force as can be commanded and to strike as hard as possible.”

--Robert Graves

La Triviata

By mid-1917 German production of artillery explosives had reached 12,000 tons a month, so far outstripping the production of shells that only 83-percent could be used.

In 1917 Chile and Brazil, which had both hitherto orgnaized their armies on the basis of three-regiment divisons (“triangular”), decided to swtich to a four-regiment basis (“square”), precisely at the time when the principal European powers were switching fromsquare divisions to triangular ones.

During World War II, the LVTs which the U.S.M.C. used to storm many an Pacific beach, were mostly manufactured by the Food Machinery Corporation.

Of about 120,000 officers in the Red Army in December 1920, during the Russian Civil War, nearly 50,000 of them (38.5%) were former Tsarist officers, such as Mihail Tuchachevsky, who rose to Marshal.

During World War I, the most dangerous poison gas used seems to have been yperite, fatal in about 3.9 of every 1,000 cases.

During the 1982 Falklands War, birds proved as deadly to British Sea King helicopters as did the enemy, each accounting for one, the same number as lost to engine failure, and only half the number lost to the weather.